2 weeks Ago By Emma Garland
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) is perhaps the most attractive slasher film ever made. Featuring a bumper brat pack cast made up of Sarah Michelle Gellar , Ryan Phillippe, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr – hamming it up as a beauty queen, buff quarterback, introspective nerd and working class aspiring writer, respectively – it became an instant teen horror classic . It wasn’t as smart as Scream (1996), or as subversive as The Faculty (1998), but it followed the formula that made the genre such a box office smash throughout that decade: take a group of pretty young hopefuls and put their lives in danger.
It’s no surprise, then, to find the genre next up on Hollywood’s agenda, as part of its effort to remake, reboot and otherwise franchise every pre-existing bit of IP in the industry. Following two flop sequels in 1998 and 2006, a new version of I Know What You Did Last Summer is due out in July. The trailer dropped this week and, in the timeless words of Castillo .
.. it’s not looking good, brev.
Obviously, you can’t glean everything from a trailer, but here’s what we know: the sequel rehashes the plot of the first – a group of friends cause a deadly car accident and make a pact to cover it up – but sets the action some 27 years later, in the same universe. The lead cast is a collection of perfectly fine actors from various dramas on Netflix (Madelyn Cline), HBO Max (Chase Sui Wonders), the CW (Tyriq Withers), Amazon Prime (Sarah Withers) and the BBC (Jonah Hauer-King). Love Hewitt and Prinze Jr are reprising their roles as Julie James and Ray Bronson.
It’ll probably do alright and receive a similarly middling 48 per cent critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, like the original, but for very different reasons. Here’s the thing: the original I Know What You Did Last Summer is not an objectively good film. The plot is implausible, the script is paint-by-numbers but has its moments (“We can’t all sit in a village coffee house and ramble esoterically on a laptop!”), and the gore is camp – all factors that divided viewers at the time, and saw it branded a “guilty pleasure”.
Ultimately, though, the OG is held together by the strength of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s hairspray and the leading cast’s chemistry: Gellar’s guileless charm, Phillippe’s simmering adolescent rage, Hewitt’s impenetrable earnestness, and those round doleful eyes of Prinze Jr’s, that make him look like a Golden Retriever trapped in the body of a man. Without all that, it’s just a high production value after-school special about the dangers of drunk driving. Unfortunately, these crucial elements – real chemistry, camp appeal, emotional depth – seem to slip from the minds of anyone attempting to remake a cult classic for a modern audience.
Let us consider two staggering misfires released in 2024 by way of example. First, Rupert Sanders’s 2024 resurrection of The Crow , which bombed on multiple fronts. There were complaints that the fact it was being made at all was disrespectful to the memory of Brandon Lee, who died on set making the original.
Then, there’s the fact that it tried to bait a contemporary audience by exchanging Lee’s iconic rendering of Eric Draven for a Soundcloud rapper-type with transfer tattoos. Finally, and likely as a direct result of the previous point, it lacked the sort of emotional heft that continues to make the first so resonant, which is why it will be forgotten, dismissed as an “ unfathomably awful goth remake ”. Then, Doug Liman’s reboot of Road House , which trades Patrick Swayze dealing out ’80s action barbs (“prepare to die!”) and smashing small-time cocaine dealers with tables in a honky tonk bar for Jake Gyllenhaal doing high-speed yacht chases and grappling in a UFC ring.
The reviews were better than The Crow ’s, but still undeniably middling. The best anyone could say was that it was “ almost ” as good as the original. With “contemporary generic” lighting and colour grading that makes it unclear whether you’re watching a Netflix sitcom or a Nike advert, I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) already feels doomed to go the same way.
At this point, we all have reboot fatigue. Arguably the tipping point arrived in the 2010s, somewhere between the female Ghostbusters and Shrek 5 , but this time last year it was confirmed by market research. A study commissioned by the streaming service Tubi found that the vast majority of millennial and Gen Z viewers crave more original stories from “independent and small-time creators”.
This reflects box office trends, which show that audiences for art house films are growing larger and skewing younger , with ticket sales for hits like The Iron Claw , Poor Things and The Holdovers coming predominantly from under-35s. There’s clearly a diminishing appetite for things like Snow White (Taylor’s version) and Shrek 6 (6!), and yet, they keep being pumped out of the major studios and walking directly off a cliff, like so many lemmings. There’s a pervasive belief within the entertainment industries that younger audiences have no attention span, no reverence for 20th-century pop culture, and no desire to watch something unless it features Jacob Elordi topless.
As a result, we have too many films that pander to old audiences instead of appealing to new ones. Instead of fresh stories reflecting contemporary concerns, we’re spoon-fed old stories with a new finish, like a lazy landlord painting over the light switches. And rather than household names and bold directors carrying ridiculous scripts, we have serviceable actors and inoffensive directors working with rehashed storylines.
We have I Know What You Did Last Summer , again – this time with Gabbriette! It’s extra maddening when you consider how wild swings and daring ideas are often rewarded. The biggest Oscars sweep this year came from Anora , an indie Cinderella story about a stripper who impulsively marries the son of an oligarch. Across the board, original scripts – from Barbie to Oppenheimer to Sound of Freedom – are outperforming long-running franchises like Mission Impossible, Indiana Jones and Guardians of the Galaxy .
Even with that evidence laid bare, the lion’s share of the box office represents a cynical attempt to guarantee turnover by offering us the same slop over and over again, like a mocking Davina McCall asking, “Do you want another one?” At some point, someone will have to accept that the answer is, “Nah, thanks, we’re full.”.
